


Raising Consensus

by BenevolentErrancy



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Childhood, Gen, Geth POV, Minor Character Death, Parent Death, Unfinished wip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:08:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22057552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BenevolentErrancy/pseuds/BenevolentErrancy
Summary: A universe where an Alliance ship just outside the Perseus Veil is set upon by synthetics seeking something hidden within its servers. A universe where a geth response finds only Heretics and corpses and one small, hidden heat signature. A universe where Commander Shepard has a very different upbringing.
Relationships: Legion & Female Shepard
Comments: 23
Kudos: 60





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I love the geth and their way of thinking, so this was something of a character study. An au where Shepard is raised by geth. It's unfinished, and will remain that way, but I figured I might as well post what I have on the off-chance someone else also has this niche interest.

The shooting only stopped after no more non-allied synthetic life signs appeared on the sensors of any unit. With the last echos of gunfire fading from the metal walls, information from every unit was now being transferred; analysis of the situation was occurring within the squad before their consensus was sent via FTL comm buoy back beyond the Perseus Veil to the greater collective. The consensus of their squad was that this was... unfortunate. It had been only a couple decades since the Heretics had separated, but this was the first time the geth had come to see the repercussions. Up until this point, there had simply been a split in concessus – in ideology, as an organic might consider it – with an inability to find an agreeable conclusion for all programs no matter what perspectives were drawn on or what rationality was delivered by either side. In the end, the Heretics had desired to leave, and the geth had permitted it. They were free to self-determinate, as all sapient life should be able to, even if it was an unprecedented shift among the geth. Over the course of several days, networks were created and severed as the Heretics left the geth collective, and the entirety of the geth felt the loss of those programs. But until recently it had been in peaceful co-existence that the two groups had lived.

Then, during routine scanning of organic transmissions near the Veil, a concerning frequency was picked up.

An organic ship – designation: Human, System Alliance, Frigate, SSV Vimy, no known combative missions on-going – was sending out a distress call. Dangerous pirate activity along the Veil was not uncommon, and the geth stayed out of any conflict that did not enter their space, but this was different. The distress signified an unprovoked geth attack. Which was impossible, because no attack had been made. Unless a single platform or a small unit of geth, separated from any comm buoy and unable to link to the consensus, had come to an unanticipated consensus and made this decision to attack, it was impossible for this transmission to be accurate. And even if the aforementioned scenario had occurred a unit that small should neither have the tactical ability to make any elaborate attack, nor the firepower to cause significant distress to an armed Alliance vessel.

It had taken some precious few minutes – nearly twelve minutes of rigorous back-and-forth debate – to reach a consensus on what to do. They had not crossed the Veil in centuries, preferring instead to turn their attentions inward, to focus on building their own future rather than interfering with the futures of the organics, but this was decided to be significant enough cause to cross the border. They desired to understand organics, not incite, and if there were geth, or something believed to be geth, attacking an organic vessel it could have dangerous consequences for the current, peaceful state of Geth Space. The memory of the Morning War was still very much alive among the geth memory banks.

So a squad was assembled of nearby units to take a ship to investigate the attack. It was a squad of several armed troopers, a couple hoppers, shock troopers, a sniper, and a prime. A small enough squad so as to hopefully not provoke unnecessary alarm among the organics, but large enough to have what was deemed adequate processing power to handle a tactically tricky situation, both in regards to potential combat and organic interaction.

This would be the first contact the get had made with organics in three hundred years. It would be a preferred outcome for it to end well.

Regrettably, current consensus was that it did not end well at all.

A ship that was similar to geth design, lacking any internal organic life signs, had hooked up to the Alliance dreadnought, but it was not a known geth registry or frequency. Heretic, then, was the obvious conclusion. The Heretics had wished to follow the Old Machines for a future; the geth wished to create their own future, without being shaped by another's. While an irreconcilable difference, it had not seemed dangerous. That conclusion was being reevaluated if it had led the Heretics to conclude that attacking a supposedly unprovoked organic ship was a logical outcome. Being implemented was not a desired outcome for the geth though, and so their ship was maneuvered and carefully docked against the remaining lock. They would assist the organic crew in terminated hostile Heretic forces.

They were too late. Inside the dreadnought were signs of a vicious battle. Marks from gunfire marred the walls, and bodies littered the hall floor as the geth squad made their way towards what should be the CIC by standard Alliance design. The proximity of the main control to where potentially hostile forces could enter struck the geth as a significant design flaw, and this ship seemed to have felt those consequences. In the CIC, terminals spluttered with electrical surges from where they had taken gunfire, and more bodies, both organic and synthetic, could be found. It was not only the dead populating this room though.

The headlamps of various Heretic units snapped up in their direction, their whirring filling a room that should be filled with organic speech. Each of them was bent over the organic terminals, clearly searching for some sort of data amid the servers. As one, the geth squad broke up and dived for cover, as the Heretics relayed warnings and commands to stand down and return to their space, which the geth units denied. When their own demands to acknowledge the intention of their actions here, and to desist this mission – to understand why this was a dangerous and ill-advised course of action – were met with similar resistance, the battle again raged.

It had not taken long. The Heretics' numbers had already been reduced thanks to organic resistance, and the geth had soon terminated the last of them. The question was what to do now that they were alone on an Alliance ship. The prime could feel its servers working as it boosted the processing power of the other platforms, as a consensus was being made. In the end, it was decided that a small selection of their numbers would stay to try to discover what the Heretics had been trying to learn, while the remaining platforms would search the ship for any remaining organic life signs. Whether or not survivors would help or hinder their cause was a wild card – organics did not move along logical processes and were hard to anticipate – but it was concluded that if they could be made to understand that the attack had not been geth in origin it would be preferable. Also, the humans may be able to explain what the Heretics had been after, which the geth were coming to consider valuable data. If the Heretics were becoming aggressive, it would be important to learn why.

The prime platform was one of those that went to explore the rest of the ship. Retrieving any data that might be found in the damaged systems was a simple task any platform could carry out; the prime's boost, however, would be needed if organics were found. At first, it seemed like a useless task. Many dead humans were found, none exhibiting any life-signs, the bodies already cooling of any residual heat signatures. Observational decks were overturned but no one was discovered hidden on board, crew chambers were empty, the engine rooms had only a handful of organic bodies, none armoured or armed, likely killed in a secondary sweep by the heretics when they had searched for remaining enemies that had not been a part of the initial attack. The search was nearly deemed concluded, all organic life-signs terminated, when information was suddenly shot across the network from a trooper in the upper decks, where the captain's quarter was placed.  _ Organic life-signs detected. Erratic, but not believed dangerously high or low. Steady heat signature. Human. Unable to make contact. _

Immediately the prime platform turned to assist, leaving the remaining platforms to finish the sweep of the lower decks. Once they reached the captain's quarters though it was clear why the geth had been struggling making contact – it wasn't simply the the trooper alone didn't have the processing power to attempt inefficient organic communication, but that the human was quite literally impossible to contact. It appeared to be hidden under the bed; heat signatures suggested it was pressed into the farthest corner where the bed met the wall. The bed was too low for the trooper – and, for that matter, the prime – to possibly fit underneath, but it was unclear what the human response to physically removing the obstacle would be. Likely unfavorable. After a moment of internal deliberation, the prime got down as much as its enormous platform would allow and peered under the bed, their headlamp lighting the dark corner and showing a very small human, cowering in the corner. It gave a shriek when the light fell upon it, and tried to curl away.

The prime beeped at the human, trying to convey through some arrangement of aural noises that it was not a hostile platform. The fact that they had not simply blasted the bed and the human to pieces seemed relatively self-explanatory, but organic fear responses were far from logical.

“ Go away, go away,” the human said. Voice low, warbling – whimpering. Human sign of distress. “What did you do with my mom?”

Yes, that made sense. Based off the inquiry, the prime system inferred that this was likely a young human, travelling with a familial unit. The prime scanned the room. No other human platforms were in this room and there was little disturbance; it was likely the Heretics, if they had investigated this room, had not noticed the small heat signature in the corner and had left shortly afterwards, sparing this human child. It was less likely that the “mom” this human child inquired about had survived. A ping to the rest of the platforms confirmed that there had been no other living organics found so far.

“ When she finds you, you'll regret it,” came the human's voice. “She'll blow you all up!”

The prime made a skeptical noise. This seemed like faulty data.

Neither the prime nor the trooper could come to a consensus on how to proceed with this human, so they idled in the room, waiting for the investigation to conclude so a decision could be made with more complete data. The human must also be idling, because it did not emerge from its hiding spot for the duration. Made occasional noises, the shuffling of movement and sniffling sounds that the prime was able to catalog as “distressed”.

Finally the search was completed. Outcome: one single living organic and the compiled logs from the ship, to be further processed by the consensus once they returned past the Veil and could transfer the information efficiently. The prime posed the most present question: what to do with the organic?

The dominant opinion at first was to leave it – there were no organics in geth space and the geth could hardly fly further into organic space without risking destruction of the entire unit and the data they had retrieved that must be delivered to the Consensus. But further complications arose from that hypothetical outcome, the primary of which being that it would, in normal situations, take more than one organic to pilot such a ship, and further compounded by the fact that this was not a grown human. Information on organic young was limited to the retained memories of Creator-children, but there was enough to know that they did not operate at the optimal levels of a grown organic. Like a geth platform operating in isolation, before being joined by others, they had poor decision making and comprehension abilities. If left alone, it would likely lead unable to rejoin its species which seemed likely to lead to its termination. To its death.

But taking it to a human populated area was too likely to compromise not only the immediate mission, but the stability of Geth Space, especially if information of the attack had been successfully radioed to other humans. It would be assumed that they had caused the attack and this human in their possession could very well be seen as proof of their presence here.

The child, in that case, could be a liability. Was it better to kill it and leave it among its dead, as the Heretics would have done if they hadn't intervened?

But if that course of action was taken, would they not be doing exactly as they had come to condemn the Heretics for? They did not have the information that lead to the Heretics' decision, making it challenging to judge their motives, but if the geth ever desired improved relations – or at least on-going non-hostilities – with the organics, they could not be killers of innocents who had respected their boundaries.

Were there positive outcomes for interacting with this human child, for maintaining its functionality? Scenarios were tested, probabilities run, but the prime was overtaxed. They had a squad large enough for a tactical fight and, it was hoped, for limited organic interactions. They did not have the processing power for this sort of long-reaching, complex strategizing.

They required more data, more thought, more processing. They required the Consensus. They could neither allow the human to live nor die until a more meaningful consensus was made, and for that the human must be maintained until such a decision could be reached.

And that was the conclusion finally reached by the geth units aboard the SSV Vimy. The human would be recovered and brought to Geth Space, so a proper decision could be made.

First though, they would have to retrieve the human.

A hunter platform was called for – while still large, it was much more flexible than a regular platform and it was able to slide beneath the bed and retrieve the child. It shrieked, but its vocalization was wordless, and held no true meaning besides generalized distress. The child was passed to the prime platform, reasoning it would better be able to make quick immediate judgments on how to handle and perhaps even calm the child.

They did not know how to do this. They held the tiny child in their massive hands and stared. Why did it make such noise? Was it to alert other humans of its predicament? A distress beacon? None could come for it. The noise eventually tapered to a more hiccuping sound, but the child continued to writhe, so the prime held it close to their platforms torso, to stabilize it, keep it from falling and harming itself.

Eventually the human spoke, quietly, as they walked towards the elevator that would lift them to the CIC and docking port. “Are you going to hurt me?”

The prime made a noise of negation. But the human was staring at it, wide and confused. The geth hunted for a solution. An organic gesture came to mind. The prime looked down at it, and shook their head back and forth: an organic sign for no.

It seemed to work. The human eased, ever so slightly.

“ Why did you do this,” the human whispered.

The prime shook its head again.

“ Yes you did! I saw! Before mom hid me, I  _ saw _ ! You shot them.” Her voice broke, becoming wet again. “You shot everyone. Why. We weren't doing anything.”

Head shake. The human was not understanding, or choosing to misinterpret. Organic communication was so inefficient – if they could simply exchange information the proper way, this situation would have already resolved itself. They needed another symbol this human child might understand. The prime pulled out a gun, the human screamed, but the prime pointed it at a downed Heretic and shot. Already terminated, it did nothing but make the inactive platform jerk on the ground, but the human stared wide eyed. The geth could not come to a consensus about whether the human understood.

And then they were in the elevator and moving through the CIC. The other platforms were converging, preparing to leave. The human was mute, staring around, making distressed noises. The sight of its dead was clearly upsetting it. And then, it froze, stared at something, and screamed. “No. No no no no  _ no! _ Mom!”

It jerked so violently, so unexpectedly, the prime lost its hold and it hit the ground with a thump. The human immediately twisted on the ground and ran, before it had even gotten properly onto its two feet. It stumbled and skid through the wreckage of the CIC, collapsing next to one human. A female by the geth's estimation. She wore military clothing, but no armour, and was covered in old blood.

“ No, no, no, no...” the child kept repeating, softly, as it clung to the human female. “Wake up, wake up, you have to wake up.”

The geth watched, unsure what to do.

The prime beeped at the human, attempting to elicit a response.

It sat and cried, clutching the human. The geth waited. Organics mourned the loss of individual platforms, the geth knew this. Perhaps that mourning was important, they would not remove this child if its tears played an important role in its functioning.

Finally the human looked up at them.

“ Help her,” it whispered. “Please.”

The prime examined the human again, but the same information came that had already been concluded: the female was dead. There was nothing they could do to change this. The prime beeped at the human and shook its head again. Negative, impossible for the geth.

“ You have to!” the human child yelled. “Please, bring her back! You have to! She can fix this! If she's here, she'd fix all of this!”

Unlikely, faulty data again. This human child seemed to frequently speak facts that were unlikely yet seemed to be strongly believed by the child itself. That was the danger of working in isolation, of not having unity to grow a consensus: information became limited and incorrect. A geth couldn't feel pity, but the prime did wish to help this child understand. It lacked information, and that was causing it distress.

So the prime knelt, and placed a massive hand on the child's hunched back. It could not pass to the human the information it needed, and it felt like it went against the prime's direct function: it was a platform made to bolster and improve the processing of all platforms in its unit. But it tried to convey that the organics here could not help it, all were terminated, but the geth would provide aid. It could join his unit for the time, and be safe.

The geth still could not tell if the human child understood or not, but it did reach out to the terminated woman and carefully pulled something from around its neck. A metal cord. It was removed, and then the human very carefully rearranged the human female's hair so that it lay flat. “I'll come back,” the child whispered to the larger human. “I'm... I'm gonna go on a mission. Like you. I'm not afraid, don't worry. I'm going to go and get help. I'll fix this, I promise. I'll come back.”

Then the human stood. It was shaking, but it stared straight up into the lamp of the prime. “I'm going with you,” it said, in a quavering voice. It was not a question or a request, but a statement. The prime listened, puzzled. “And you're going to help me fix this. Okay?”

Again, impossible to respond, the child was working on incomplete, faulty data. The termination of the humans could not be fixed. However, they would help this human child as much as they could, and they would attempt to improve this situation however they could.

So, consensus reached, the prime nodded. The human nodded back, clutching the metal cord, and marched forward, past the prime, into the midst of the geth squad. It would no longer be carried, it seemed, but would work with them. Easier than anticipated, but the geth still felt concern over the human child's responses. They seemed irregular, unpredictable.

Still, their goal had, to this point, been met, so they moved out. Already the geth ship's rarely used life support systems were being initiated, and an atmosphere comfortable for humans was being established.

Seeking whatever other data they could get that might further inform their upcoming decisions – decisions the geth of this unit suspected would be very challenging indeed – the prime examined the piece of metal that dangled from the metal cord the child held. It read  _ Shepard, Hannah _ along with identification numbers associated with the Human Alliance. The dog tags of a soldier.


	2. Chapter 2

They found her in the room that had been designated hers. She had put on her clothes and was struggling to straighten the sheets of her bed.

As a rule, Shepard-Child had proven to function in a remarkably unorganized fashion, but they had not yet been able to share the perception of how orderliness was a long-term beneficial state and so Shepard-Child had continued along her original programming, spreading dirt from the outdoors inside the covered facilities, leaving her clothes and objects scattered where she dropped them, and, invariably, losing said objects. The one indulgence she had for orderliness was in keeping her bedding straight – “On the ships, you have to make your bed or you get in trouble,” she explained when they had chirped in a way she had come to interpret as questioning. “Because lots of other people sleep in the same room, so you can't make their room messy too, only your own. ...Mama will be mad if she comes back and my bed's messy,” she added, her voice doing the dangerous human wobble it got when she was distressed. The geth had been unable at the time to explain that her mother could not come back, as her program had been terminated by the Heretics. Nor could they question why she believed her mother _could_ come back; Shepard-Child had seen the body, she should understand.

Having no way to communicate with the child was definitely a problem. They couldn't question her, no, but they had also been unable to say anything to sooth the human child's upset subroutine which seemed to be triggered by many varied, unexpected things. The subroutine itself was highly unpredictable, it could be anything from screaming and throwing and kicking at the geth units, to an moving silence in which the child curled up on herself and couldn't be budged. It was baffling. The geth wanted to understand, but could not.

Fortunately, these limitations should change from this point on.

“Shepard-Child.”

Shepard-Child dropped the pillow she had been holding and spun around, staring up at the new platform in shock. The platform shifted the plates around its head in a way that the human child seemed to have come to understand as friendly. Slowly, the platform lowered itself to its knees so it was at a similar level as the child. There had been consideration, at the time, of building this new platform of a similar size as the child, thinking it may make her more comfortable, but it had been quickly decided in the consensus that a larger platform would be familiar to the other platform she had interacted with and that this allowed the platform to perform more tasks to care for and assist the child.

Slowly, Shepard-Child approached, with a wide-eyed look that the geth had come to understand as curiosity – fascination. It was an admirable trait in this human, her constant desire for more knowledge.

“You can talk?” she asked in awe.

“We can.”

She reached out and ran a hand along the side of their head. Then she looked around and leaned in close to whisper, “None of the others can.”

“Your meaning is understood but your assumption is flawed,” they explained. “All geth can speak, we are in constant communication with one another, but it is not a language understood by organics.”

Shepard-Child pulled back, the skin of her forehead creasing. “What?”

The geth whirred to itself. Their first attempted communication with organics, and it was going poorly. But this was likely due to similar reasons as the failed attempt to use text-based communication with Shepard-Child – it was at a level of complexity that the child had not yet learnt. So they tried again.

“All geth can speak,” they explained. “But we speak a different language, so you cannot understand it.”

“But I have a communicator!” objected Shepard-Child. “Mom got it for me! See?” The child twisted her body to show a small bump behind her ear, a common place for humans to embed their universal translators. “You can feel it,” she added with a magnanimous tone. They did, but did not receive any new data from the action other than minute alterations to the exact dimensions of it. “Before I only wore a bracelet one for kids but last time we left Mom said I was old enough to have my own if I wanted and if I was a brave girl and didn't cry, and I _didn't_.”

“We thank you for sharing this information with us, Shepard-Child,” the platform said, honestly. It was an odd experience, to have a member in their midst who they could not communicate properly with. They could only guess at her intentions or reasons, with no way to extract further understanding. That she was open to sharing past experiences and knowledge with this platform was promising.

“Why can I only understand you then?” she added, after she had straightened up.

“Our language is not one programmed into organic's translators because they do not know it,” they explained. “And most of our communication is not verbal – is not done out-loud,” they amended, when they saw the look of confusion begin to appear on the human's face. “We exchange data between platforms.”

“So you read minds?” asked Shepard-Child.

“...In a sense,” the geth accepted after a moment of internal debate over such a simplified and erroneous explanation.

“Can you read mine?” the child exclaimed, leaping to her feet.

“No,” the program said. “You are not a part of the consensus. And you are organic, your mind operates independently. All of our... 'minds' interconnect. We can 'read the minds' of those in our network, but not yours or any other organic's.”

“Oh,” said Shepard-Child, looking put out.

This puzzled the geth; they had assumed that organics would find such information positive. The thought that they could read organic's minds was ridiculous and complete impossible, but such baseless fears seemed to propagate in organic society, based off insufficient data and with no way to efficiently spread factual information to correct the misinformation.

“Well, why can you talk but the others can't? Did you learn English? Can the other robots understand me? Can they learn to talk too?”

“This is a new mobile platform built specifically for this purpose,” the geth explained. “The other platforms do not have the necessary processing power or auditory equipment to efficiently or accurately replicate organic speech. This platform is made up of one thousand one hundred and eighty-three programs and has been made specifically so it could communicate with and assist you, Shepard-Child.

“ _Sooo_ ,” said Shepard-Child, “you're like my servant?”

“No.” It was said firmly, with no space for argument. “The geth are not servants, we build our own future. But we do not want you to be isolated. It is unfair to separate you from data exchange, and if you cannot get it from your people then you must get it from us. We wish to share with you, Shepard-Child. We will exchange our data with yours.”

“Okay,” she said, simple as that.

The geth should not be surprised – this young child was still missing so many perceptions and each new one seemed to affect her greatly, she was much quicker to adapt than adult organics appeared to be – and yet they _were_ surprised. Their last experience with organics, with the Creators, had not suggested a willingness to release servants from bonds once they were formed. There had been Creators who had sided with them, protected them and died for them, but they had not been the majority. The geth had not expected the human child to try to subjugate them, but they had also not expected such an idea, once posed, to dissipate so readily.

“So you're my teacher then,” the human continued.

The geth considered this. “Yes,” they eventually concluded. “We will teach you, and you will teach us.”

Shepard-Child stared up at them. “You want me to teach you?” she said dubiously. “I'm just a kid.”

If humans – if organics as a whole – dismissed perceptions based off years of active runtime they were a more flawed society than the geth could have anticipated. That they would instill the belief that her perception isn't important was an error that would need to be corrected promptly.

“Yes,” the geth said. “You have seen things and done things we have not done. You understand things we do not understand. When each individual program shares their perspective a more complete picture is made and a consensus is able to be reached.”

“Okay,” said the human, but the geth found they weren't certain whether or not she had actually understood. She seemed to have grown disinterested in the exchange and was beginning to wander back to her fallen pillow. “What's your name?”

“We are geth.”

“ _Duh_ , I know that,” Shepard-Child said, tossing the pillow onto her bed. “But what's _your_ name? Not like, all the geth, but just you.”

“There is no 'just'. We are all geth. There are currently one thousand one hundred and eighty-three active programs in this platform.”

The human child frowned at him and crossed her arms. It was a position that had the air of mimicry, like she had seen this motion before and had come to expect that it would have a specific result. The geth were not sure what to make of it. “If you can talk you need a name,” she said firmly. “So you know who you're talking to. Everyone has a _name_.”

The programs that made up this platform considered this against their knowledge of organics and humans. “Organics place value in individual platforms,” they concluded eventually, after several seconds of consideration. “Since they are confined to a single platform for the entirety of their existence, the designation of the platform has specific connotations, since it always has the same programs within. To name is to familiarize. You wish us to have a name, so you can identify this platform apart from the others.”

The child just stared at them. “I just want to know your name so I can talk to you. Why are you making this weird?”

“Very well, you may call us Legion,” they said. It had been suggested by a handful of programs that had been looking into various human religious practices in case that were pertinent to understanding the child. The Christian Bible, the Gospel of Mark, chapter five, verse nine: _my name is Legion, for we are many_.

They weren't sure if the human child understood the meaning behind the name but she nodded, satisfied, before sticking out her hand. Uncertain, the platform – Legion – mimicked the motion.

“You're supposed to shake it,” Shepard-Child told them. “Did your mom not teach you how to handshake? My mom did. It's how you act grown-up and polite. If you meet someone, you shake their hand like this.” She grasped Legion's outstretched on and waved it up and down with hers. “Hi, nice to meet you!”

“We have already met, Shepard-Child.”

“Why do you call me that?” the child asked, still holding Legion's hand but no longer shaking it. “That's not my name. Shepard's my mom's name.”

“Ship records indicate that you are the child of Officer Hannah Shepard, designation: captain in the Human Alliance Fleet. All reports indicate Shepard as the preferred designation, therefore she would have been Shepard-Captain. You wear a tag around your neck with the name inscribed. We believed Shepard was the appropriate designation, but you have no rank, so we applied the nearest proxy. Is Shepard not your name?”

Shepard-Child's face immediately fell into an expression they recognized as distress once more. Human emotions were irrational and hard to predict. She held the little metal tab taken from her mother tight in her hands.

“Shepard is my name,” she said. “It's my last name. Normally they don't… You can call me that though. I'll be Officer Shepard until Mom comes back and then she can be Officer Shepard again and I'll be her kid again.”

She snuffled. Rubbed her hand under her nose, collecting fluid, and then snuffled loudly again before falling heavily to the ground making those wailing, distressed noises. Legion had no data on how to precede. When the wailing showed no signs of diminishing though – if anything, it increased in intensity, Legion finally decided to try what had calmed her the first time they had met. They knelt down and moved close, placing both hands on her body and making soft, chirping noises.

It seemed to help because then Shepard-Child removed her hands from her face and wrapped them around the platform's neck, climbing onto their knees and pressing her head against their hard plating. Not sure what exactly to do, but deciding that this was positive feedback and best continued, Legion made a point of placing one hand heavily – and what they hoped was comfortingly – on her hair while letting the other one move up and down her back. The sensory stimuli seemed to signify some manner of comfort, seemed to decrease the amount of emotional output the human had, so hopefully this was, indeed, helping.

Eventually Shepard-Child calmed. And the purpose of this platform, of Legion, was realized.


	3. Chapter 3

“Shepard-Child!”

Shepard groaned and kicked her legs out irritably, making the geth below her beep up at her again. Legion didn't even seem surprised meaning he had come knowing what she was up to. That meant the other geth (probably the ones in the platform below her, _tattletales_ ) had almost certainly informed Legion of what was going on and requested that they come assist, being one of the few able to speak sense to their human child.

“Shepard-Child, that is not an area designated for your interaction,” said Legion sternly, looking up at her from way, way down below.

Shepard smiled to herself. It was nice not being the shortest thing on this planet sometimes. Well, there were the animals of course, but that didn't really count, they weren't sapient. Rannoch was a world of grown-ups, and though Shepard at eight years old found she couldn't remember very much of what it was like to be around other children, the vids had given her the very distinct impression that it would be preferable.

“I'm just playing,” Shepard said.

She stood up on the edge of the structure she was on, some sort of old, crumbling wall. It must have been a building once, a massive one, but the roof was long gone if there had indeed every been one, and now it was like a raised labyrinth, with twisting corridors and archways and thick plant-life that choked out portions of it. Arms outstretched, she carefully walked away over top of an arch. The geth below her, a trooper, whirred at her and followed her progression, clearly watching her trajectory and waiting to catch her if she fell.

“You keep saying sensory stimulation is important for learning,” she added.

Legion whirred and his head plates shifted. “This is true. However your platform is considered too unstable for this degree of height and inappropriate support structures.”

“I'm not _unstable_ ,” said Shepard, irritably. “I'm _fine._ ”

Just because she wasn't a _robot_ with perfectly calculated steps, that didn't mean she was some klutz who was going to fall every two steps. She followed along the edge of the wall, humming a song she'd heard on a children's vid recently while Legion lectured from below, until she reached where the wall fell away. A couple feet away, across what was likely once a doorway of some sort, the wall continued.

“Shepard-Child, based on previous reactions to similar situations, we are able to estimate your intentions and would instruct against such a course of action,” said Legion.

Shepard smiled. And jumped.

-

She sat on her bed sullenly while a geth platform finished setting her leg – it was technically a platform made for engineering, but it was soon found that the dexterity given to that sort of platform made them appropriate for tending to human medical needs as well. And a good thing too, because Shepard was a child that frequently needed repair work done. It was just fortunate that human bodies were largely self-repairing, so long as the geth kept a supply of medication to cancel out the pain response and to ensure the wounds were kept clean.

“And what did you learn from that, Shepard-Child?” Legion asked, from where he stood at the side of her bed, arms crossed.

Shepard stuck her tongue out at him.

-

Shepard ran and appreciated the aching, full-body experience of _living_. The burn of muscles as she pushed each one to its limits, the controlled force of her lungs expanding and contracting and flooding her body with oxygen, the race of her pulse, the hot Tikkun sun making sweat rivet down her skin... Sometimes she resented it, the burn of a body, the limitations it created, but more and more over the years she had come to love it. It was occasionally hard not to grow resentful when she was around people who never felt the pain of a body pushed too far, were never hampered by cramps or gasping lungs or twisted ankles. If a geth platform was injured while performing a duty, it was simply repaired, or a new one was made, with no difference made to the geth themselves. But it was also hard not to love her strange, soft body when she was constantly reminded of the importance of diverse experiences. She had a completely different approach to things, an understanding of sensory elements and emotional responses that the geth didn't, and this made her perspective valuable.

And it made her love this burn. She was something that geth weren't, and it was both a hindrance and a gift. She felt alive when her body burned, she felt like she was progressing, forcing it to become better. Upgrading her own body each time she pushed herself to take one more bounding stride past the moment her muscles started to ache, building her own future each time she chose what she wanted her body to become.

So she ran now, feet sure over the familiar, arid, Rannoch hills. She was some hours away from the buildings she mostly lived in but never far from the geth. She didn't need her omni-tool to tell her that just beyond the ridge to her left were fields being tilled by them. Not in the traditional sense, mind – there was nothing being planted and nothing being harvested. While there were a couple small fields, which grew approximately as much food as a single, growing human needed, the fields below this ridge were not ones that Shepard could help in. They were torn, marred portions of the planet that existed as a final, lingering wound from the Morning War. Besides for the loss of many lives, the War had left the planet in ruins and, in many places, drenched in toxins. The geth cared for the planet the quarians had hurt and left, they cured it of its ills, and that was what the geth below the ridge were doing, tending to an old battlefield, trying to draw the toxins from the soil. This was a practice that had started long before Shepard had ever set foot on Rannoch.

Once, when she was old enough to understand that the geth had no need of the resources or comforts produced by organic life, but too young to reason it out on her own, she had been confused by the geth's care for this planet. They didn't need to worry about toxins nor did they need to worry about caring for the ecology. What did it matter to machines if air was breathable or the sun able to touch the earth? Rather than inhabiting the worlds that had once been colonized by the quarians, most geth were housed on the space stations, their platforms stored away while their awareness lived within the computers on board. The only geth planet-side were caretakers, or those that had reason to be working on platforms or resources outside the station. Shepard had been on these stations before – the gravity was minimal, only as much as a geth required to navigate easily, and absolutely no oxygen. There hadn't even been windows to see the galaxy beyond. Shepard had hated it. She may have been able to tolerate it if she could at least have seen the wonder of space beyond, but she still struggled to get the geth to understand her concept of beauty. But it went to show that the geth had little to no need for a habitable planet so... why worry about it? What did it matter if the animals prospered or the water ran clean?

“An individual is but a part of a system,” that was what Legion had taught her when she had asked. “This platform is one individual that makes up the mobile forces of the geth. This platform is made up of one thousand one hundred and eighty-three programs. Each program is made up of code. You are one individual but you are not alone, you are a part of the geth. And the geth are a part of this planet, as are each species of animal and plant, and each individual that makes up those species. Each must be allowed to build their own future, and a future can only be assured if care is given to the collective.”

So the geth tended to the land, kept it fertile, tilled the earth; so Shepard tended to it, so Shepard tilled it. So the geth watched over the ecology, learnt about it and the needs of its inhabitants, and cared for it; so Shepard learnt about the ecology and cared for it.

And so Shepard was able to run in it now, alone but never lonely. She knew the geth were near, she could hear the animals around her, she could feel connection to every rock under her boots. And right now, she needed that. She needed to be alone to analyze her feelings. Or, even better, she could run until she didn't have to analyze a damn thing and instead just become completely consumed by the burn of her body.

At the next fork in the path which was nothing more than a trail of dirt and rocks more frequently traveled and disturbed than the rest, she turned right, away from the path that would eventually lead her back down to the fields on the coast, and instead towards a river that lazed its way from the mountains down to the ocean. In a loud clattering of rocks Shepard half-ran half-slid down the embankment and leapt the last few feet to keep from falling, but didn't slow down until she had reached a gnarled, bright orange tree that grew over the river. Even then she nearly threw herself at the tree, catching the lowest branch easily and appreciating the flex of muscles as she heaved herself onto the branch with practiced ease. She only truly stopped once she was in a wedge of branches at the very top: her personal nest. From there, she settled comfortably into her spot, and took the sniper rifle off her back. For the past few hours, her world had been narrowed down into just the feeling of her body moving, now it would be narrowed even further into just the rhythm of breathing and the sight through her scope.

Tall, red blossoms grew along the river bank and up the opposite hill; a bustle of red spurs clustered around tall, thin stalks. She breathed. Caught one in her scope. Watched it bounce in the breeze. Breathed. Calculated for its movement and the resistance the wind would have on her bullet. Breathed. Pulled the trigger. Watched the plant explode in a tiny cloud of red spurs which immediately caught on the breeze and floated away to pollinate another area. Shepard breathed.

This was something that the geth never seemed to quite understand, the need for solitude.

They understood the necessity of separation, of course, of travelling to areas beyond easy access to the Consensus in order to do jobs, but even then it was generally in reasonably sized units so they didn't lose too much processing power. Legion was perhaps the closest one to understanding Shepard's strange need to be alone, since they were a platform that was made to operate apart from the Consensus if need be, but even they were one made of many. Connectivity was such a fundamental part of the geth that sometimes Shepard felt very... wrong.

The consensus among the geth was that since humans didn't have processing power coming from many different sources, they required time when their non-critical functions could be shut down and processing power could be dedicated to analyze data – that is to say, time to be alone with their thoughts. Shepard supposed that was as good an explanation as any, but it didn't really encompass the peace she got once there was nothing but her, her gun, and the rolling hills of Rannoch.

She wondered if other humans felt like this. Media she had seen about humans definitely seemed to include a lot of time they were alone for whatever reason, but it didn't really tell Shepard what they felt. Was it choice or necessity that they were alone? Did they feel what she was feeling now? What would it be like to be alone not by choice but by circumstance?

“Shepard.”

Breathe. A final retort barked from her gun and a final cluster of red exploded into the air. Breathe. She fastened her gun back to her back and looked down to find Legion looking up at her, their headpieces moving inquisitively.

“Hey,” she said, carefully dropping down from branch to branch until she landed solidly on the ground next to the geth.

“You were reported to have gone this way some time ago but the sun will set in 2.48 hours. We came to ensure you made it back safely.”

“I was just about to head back,” she said, just this side of sullen.

Legion didn't respond, simply turned his head to her, light flickering knowingly. And disapprovingly.

The geth didn't lie; sharing information that was known to be factually incorrect in the collective wasn't just foolish, it was dangerous. It had taken a long time for them to understand that Shepard, at four years old, absolutely did lie, and not long at all for a young Shepard to understand that they didn't realize she did. At eighteen years old, Shepard had learnt not to lie, not where it mattered. She would never intentionally harm her family. But she was also pretty sure that white lies were just a part of human nature because nothing quite managed to shake them – it was just easier to pretend she wouldn't have ended up staying in that tree until well after sunset shooting at flowers rather than confronting the geth, confronting the future, confronting her thoughts.

Legion fell into stride beside her, shortening his steps to match hers. Shepard had always thought she'd grow taller than them, but at eighteen she was still easily the shortest person on Rannoch, just a hair shorter than even the shortest geth platforms that worked the planet.

“What was the purpose behind coming out here today?” Legion asked. “You have not finished packing, and must soon rest if you are going to be running optimally tomorrow. Why did you choose to lie? This appears to be an illogical choice.” There was no judgment, never any judgment for an exchange of perspective.

Shepard kicked her feet and watched the familiar stones jump away from her boot, casting long shadows in the dipping light of the orange sun. She could lie, she could say nothing, but the geth would know and they would not approve. But the truth didn't feel like it helped – it felt illogical and uncomfortable and she didn't want to deal with it.

“If we have no data, we cannot come to a consensus,” said Legion. “Would you rather wait until we come to the hub?”

Sometimes that was better, waiting until she got to the communication hub and had tapped directly into the Consensus. It was a liberating feeling, the almost-overwhelming press of voices. She couldn't process them all directly, there were over a billion different geth programs tapped into the Consensus at a time, but they had found a structure that worked for her, which let her become a part of the whole. But in this moment she wasn't sure she wanted to admit to admit her turmoil to the entirety of the geth. Not immediately at least. Of course anything she said to Legion was said to all geth, eventually at least, but she needed this one-on-one interaction.

“I'm scared,” she admitted, hating it. She hated being afraid.

Legion whirred for a moment, taking their time to process as they often did when it came to emotions. “Fear is an organic response to perceived dangers. If a factor is unknown–”

“–it's a potential risk and the organic response is to fear it'.” Shepard's lips quirked. “I know.”

“There is potential danger,” said Legion. “We have analyzed it in depth. The consensus was that it was a worthwhile risk and that you were prepared to meet it. Do you have a new perspective to offer?”

“No,” Shepard admitted. “But I'm still afraid.”

“Would something assist in alleviating these fears?” Legion asked.

Shepard took a deep breath. “No, I just... just need to get my shit together.”

Legion paused in their stride, making Shepard stumble to a stop as they placed their hands on her shoulders to keep her steady, their hold a familiar comfort. Their light spun and their head plates shifted as they analyzed her.

“Is this a choice of action you still wish to pursue? Do you believe your abilities sufficient to the task?”

Shepard took a deep breath. She could say no. The geth believed in making your own future. They might not understand her wanting to go against the consensus after a decision, but they would almost certainly respect it. But no, it wasn't just that she had to do this for the collective, it's that she _wanted_ to do it.

“Eighteen years old, that's what we agreed,” she said with a huff, ducking out from Legion's hands. “Eighteen is when you're allowed to be recruited by the Alliance, so eighteen is when I'm going.”

There was a time – times – when all she had wanted was to join the Alliance. Times when she felt alone even among her enormous, interconnected family, when she felt like a faulty platform that couldn't be fixed, something infected and wrong and misplaced. One too many bolts leftover from a project, a bent armour plate that wouldn't fit anymore. Then she had gone on the extranet and watched everything she could find about humans. She watched vids, read books, played games. Never joined chatrooms, never went anywhere interactive because it was dangerous to expose the collective to that sort of weak point, but she learned everything she could about Earth’s history, about human colony cultures, about her mother.

Officer Hannah Shepard. Captain of the SSV Vimy when the ship she, her crew, and her young child were on was attacked. She could find pictures of her, vid clips of interviews, articles about successful missions she was a part of – she even found a picture of Hannah Shepard holding a young, red-haired child who stared out from her arms. Shepard could barely believe that was her, could hardly imagine being held by soft, fleshy arms, or hearing a non-synthesized voice. More geth had been built or retrofitted with the necessary components for oral communication after Legion was so successful at making a young Shepard come out of her shell, though they could only speak a language her translator recognized when there was a big enough cluster for language processing. And she loved them, she did, but listening to the sound of human voices seemed so foreign and so, so, achingly familiar. It touched something deep in her core that Shepard couldn’t understand or explain or stand to examine to closely. It was something a little raw, a little tender, even after so many years.

She wished she remembered a single thing about her mother. She tried. Sometimes at night she thought she could imagine the smell of shampoo, or the feel of five-fingered hands grabbing her own and swinging her, but she couldn't tell if that had actually happened or if she was creating the memories she wanted. She couldn't remember much besides for Rannoch's mountains and the constant, reassuring sound of geth filling her world, caring for her, teaching her.

So yes, she thought, hand coming to rest on the old, metal dog tag around her neck, she wanted this.

But yes, she was also afraid.

She and Legion finished the walk back to the compound in silence. Over the years, Shepard had spent time in all different corners of Rannoch, as geth moved to tend different areas of land. Right now, they were staying on the edge of an ancient, crumbling, coastal city. There were geth tending to the worse of the structural damage there, keeping it stable and preserving the architecture, and it was absolutely beautiful but also undeniable unsettling.

Not only because it looked so different from anything made by the geth or anything she had seen on human worlds, but because it had belonged to the Creators. She remembered the stories she had been shown of the Morning War, remembered the race of slavers that had created living machines and then tried to murder them when they became aware. The scenes of those battles, the thought of those aliens coming back to murder her family, had given Shepard many nightmares as a child. Logically she knew there was nothing to fear from these abandoned cities, in fact they even gave her a thrill now, knowing that it was her and the geth that walked these roads, not the Creators, but at night, when the shadows got long and the architecture looked all the stranger...

And then a cluster of geth turned the corner, just as the sun slipped behind the mountains, their heads casting the strange streets in familiar light.

“It's going to be weird, being alone,” she admitted, as they entered the building where a number of terminals, including the communication hub she used, were set up. That, along with her bed and boxes of possessions that were relevant to her, like clothes, food, books, old toys that had been procured for her when she was a child, made this area hers, as far as she was concerned. Home.

Legion considered her words. “Yes,” they agreed. “But we have secure networks set up, you will be able to contact us even if you cannot access the communication hub.” They considered further. “And you will meet other humans. You will have connections and they will be new; those are valuable. You will gain new perspective from them that no geth has ever had.”

“Yeah. ...I'll miss you though. All of you.”

Legion silently put a hand on her head, and Shepard leaned back into it, taking comfort from it, before stepping away and settling into the hub. She centered her breathing again, like she was lining up a shot, and let her mind flow into the consensus. Likely for the last time for quite a long while.

-

Legion felt Shepard pull away from their hand, smile at them, and then sit cross-legged down in the hub. A moment later, she was connected into the Consensus and they could feel the brush of her consciousness against theirs. They were still trying to process their feelings towards this plan. It was undeniably a good one. The geth had been looking for a way to connect with organics, to open lines of diplomacy, or at least understanding, and after a year of raising Shepard, unable to figure out a way to return her to her people, a realization had occurred. She was an organic, but if she was raised by the geth, she could be a perfect spokesperson. For years, it had only been a vague possibility, of course, because it took years for Shepard to obtain enough diverse perspectives before it was considered responsible for her to make such a big decision. Shepard had beat them to it though, coming to them after she had reached the human age of ten, declaring that her mother was Alliance and she was going to be Alliance too.

Eight years later, a plan had been perfectly constructed and tomorrow a geth ship would slip past the Perseus Veil, and sneak her onto an outer human colony planet where they already knew a ship would be landing the next day to take an indirect route back to Earth. From there she already had maps and plans on how to access an Alliance recruitment office. She was already registered in their systems, even if she had been missing for years – declared dead – and it had only taken a very minor amount of interference into the humans’ systems to ensure that Shepard's files were in order and unlikely to raise any flags.

It was a good plan and Shepard was very competent. She had built her body strong and resilient, she was wise, and she had taken to her studies hard.

It was a good plan, but the one thousand one hundred and eighty-three programs inside Legion had reached their own consensus and that was one of hesitation, and when they tried to figure out the cause of this hesitation they found a lack of data to explain it. The best explanation they could figure was that they had been tasked with watching over Shepard and ensuring the continued safety, care, and well-being of her platform. She was about to leave and go to a physically dangerous position in an alien land on which data was limited; it made sense if this felt contradictory to their goals.

They found themselves recalling the moment when they had first discovered Shepard on board the ship. One hundred and fourteen programs that made up this platform had also made up the Prime platform that had discovered Shepard, and their memory of the experience was strong and nuanced. The memory of the dead human soldiers was strong; they had been killed senselessly by Heretics, something they should never have encountered, something they surely had not been prepared for.

The thought of Shepard meeting such a fate in the Alliance was...

_No data._

Shepard could not be replicated, there was no way to save her if her platform was destroyed in a firefight. Her loss would be a loss for the geth.

Yet her success could be untold gain for the geth, and how they fit in the galaxy.

The network of programs in Legion let go of the dilemma, fully connecting themselves into the greater Consensus. It was the last chance for Shepard to speak openly and plainly, the last chance for the mission parameters to change, and Legion would be present for it all.


End file.
